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This paper aims to take stock and to increase understanding of the opportunities and threats for policing in ten European countries in the Political, Economic, Social, Technological and Legal (PESTL) environment.

This study is part of the large EU‐funded COMPOSITE project into organisational change. A PESTL analysis was executed to produce the environmental scan that will serve as a platform for further research into change management within the police. The findings are based on structured interviews with police officers of 17 different police forces and knowledgeable externals in ten European countries. The sampling strategy was optimized for representativeness under the binding capacity constraints defined by the COMPOSITE research budget.

European police forces face a long list of environmental changes that can be grouped in the five PESTL clusters with a common denominator. There is also quite some overlap as to both the importance and nature of the key PESTL trends across the ten countries, suggesting convergence in Europe.

A study of this magnitude has not been seen before in Europe, which brings new insights to the target population of police forces across Europe. Moreover, policing is an interesting field to study from the perspective of organisational change, featuring a high incidence of change in combination with a wide variety of change challenges, such as those related to identity and leadership.

The purpose of this paper is to clarify the diversity of professional perspectives on police culture in an international context.

In a first step the authors developed a standardized instrument of 45 occupational features for comparative analysis of police professional views. This set was inductively created from 3,441 descriptors of the police profession from a highly diverse sample of 166 police officers across eight European countries. Using this standardized instrument, Q-methodological interviews with another 100 police officers in six European countries were conducted.

The authors identified five perspectives on the police profession suggesting disparities in officers’ outlooks and understanding of their occupation. Yet, the findings also outline considerable overlaps in specific features considered important or unimportant across perspectives.

The study emphasizes that police culture needs to be described beyond the logic of distinct dimensions in well-established typologies. Considering specific features of the police profession determines which aspects police officers agree on across organizational and national contexts and which aspects are unique.

The feature-based approach provides concrete pointers for the planning and implementation of (inter)national and inter-organizational collaborations as well as organizational change.

This study suggests an alternative approach to investigate police culture. It further offers a new perspective on police culture that transcends context-specific boundaries.